knitting in the dark

This July I met Nancy, the mother-in-law of my friend Janie. Janie’s wedding was in Maine this summer, so I stayed up there with her and her fiance Charlie for two weeks beforehand, playing and helping them prepare for the wedding. We stayed at Nancy’s one night - I stayed in the room they call “the Weavery” - and I felt like I was in fiber-addict heaven. The room has two twin beds and a chair at one end… and three looms, two spinning wheels, a drum carder, and bookshelves with weaving yarn occupying the rest of it!

Apparently Nancy at one point owned a fiber studio in their town, but had closed it some years prior and moved all her supplies to this room upstairs in her house. Shortly after we arrived she and I got to talking about knitting and spinning and she offered to teach me on a wheel, which I immediately accepted! We didn’t get to sit down with it until a week later after the wedding and cleanup were over, but she pulled out her Louet S-10 and taught me the basics one evening. And I was hooked on spinning once again.

Returning home to NYC with samples of some different fibers from Nancy, I started watching the ravelry.com boards looking for a simple used spinning wheel to puchase. BQ hinted that if I figured out what kind I liked that I might receive a wheel for Christmas. But in September I got lucky and found a used S-10 for a very reasonable price and pounced. It arrived a week later and was quite simple to put together. I quickly finished on my new wheel the Welsh wool that I had purchased to learn spinning on my spindle!

(more to come…)

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 11:41 pm and is filed under other crafts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.